ArtistDutch
Karel Appel
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Karel Appel grew up in Amsterdam, the son of a hairdresser, and received his first oil paints as a birthday gift at age fifteen from an uncle who moonlighted as an amateur painter. That early encouragement set him on a path toward the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, which he entered in 1942 after an initial rejection. The wartime context shaped the application itself: enrollment gave students a document that helped exempt them from Nazi forced-labor conscription.
In 1948, Appel was one of the six founding members who gathered at the Café Notre-Dame in Paris to sign the CoBrA manifesto alongside Constant, Corneille, Asger Jorn, Christian Dotremont, and Joseph Noiret. The name compressed the home cities of its members: Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. What united them was a shared rejection of geometric abstraction and rationalist aesthetics in favor of raw spontaneity, collective working methods, and a visual language drawn from folk art, children's drawings, and the output of psychiatric patients. Appel had already absorbed these interests during his 1947 visit to Paris, where Jean Dubuffet's collection of Art Brut made a lasting impression.
A year after co-founding CoBrA, Appel completed his painted wood-relief mural "Vragende Kinderen" (Questioning Children) for Amsterdam City Hall. The work depicted hollow-eyed children begging at postwar German train stations. City officials found it too raw for a public building and had it covered with wallpaper, where it remained for a decade. The rejection, symptomatic of a broader Dutch hostility toward CoBrA, pushed Appel to relocate to Paris in 1950. From there his international career accelerated: he won the International Painting Prize at the São Paulo Biennale in 1953, the UNESCO Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1954, and the First Prize at the Guggenheim International Exhibition in New York in 1960. His first American show opened at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1954.
Across six decades Appel worked in painting, sculpture, graphic art, ceramics, and stage design. His canvases are immediately identifiable: thick impasto applied with a palette knife or directly squeezed from the tube, saturated reds, yellows, and greens, and figures - human, animal, or somewhere in between - assembled from swirling masses of paint. Jazz improvisation was a genuine influence; he saw in it the same quality of unpremeditated energy he sought in his own brushwork. In later years he incorporated found objects, carnival debris, and flea-market figures into three-dimensional assemblages he called "hybrids."
On the Nordic and Scandinavian auction market, Appel appears regularly at major houses. Auctionet platform houses and Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo account for the largest share of his lots in the Auctionist database, with 27 of 54 total items sold through the Norwegian house alone. Prints and multiples dominate volume, but original paintings also appear: a 1991 oil on canvas "Couple (Me and Him)" sold for 10,000 EUR, and a 1954 work "To figurer" brought 11,000 NOK. Globally, his auction ceiling sits at 1,098,838 USD for "Two Birds and a Flower," sold at Christie's Paris in 2012. Works on paper and signed lithographs from the 1970s and 1980s are the most accessible entry points, typically trading in the low thousands at regional Scandinavian auctions.